In a milestone for artificial intelligence, a computer has beaten a human champion at a strategy game that requires "intuition" rather than brute processing power to prevail, its makers said Wednesday.
Dubbed...

Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity is about to celebrate its 100th anniversary, and his revolutionary hypothesis has withstood the test of time, despite numerous expert attempts to find flaws.
"Einstein...

The remains of five archbishops of Canterbury have been accidentally discovered by builders in a hidden tomb beneath a London church, site developers said yesterday.
Some 20 lead coffins were discovered...

The first major retrospective of gay British art opens this week at the Tate Britain gallery in London, featuring a portrait of Oscar Wilde next to his prison cell door.
"Queer British Art 1861-1967"...

From Walkmans to iPhones and classic cars to robotic arms, London's new Design Museum will offer a journey through the world of contemporary design when it opens its doors to the public next week.
The...

High school girls in Japan spend an average of seven hours a day on their mobile phones, a new survey has found, with nearly 10 percent of them putting in at least 15 hours.

Boys of the same age average just over four hours mobile phone use a day, the survey by information security firm Digital Arts, published Monday, said.

Teenagers tend to use their phones for social media, such as Line, a Japanese messaging and networking app, as well as smartphone games, making movies and other sharing apps like Instagram.

The poll comes amid growing concern over youngsters getting addicted to their portable technology, with Chinese research showing heavy phone use provokes the same kind of neurological changes as alcohol or cocaine dependency.

A plane with the top speed of a homing pigeon is set to embark on a landmark round-the-world flight powered only by the sun's energy, organisers said Tuesday.

Solar Impulse 2, the first solar-powered plane to be able to fly for several days and nights, will land 12 times along its roughly 35,000 kilometre (22,000 mile) trip -- including a five-day stretch above the Pacific Ocean without a drop of fuel.

"We want to demonstrate that clean technology and renewable energy can achieve the impossible," said Solar Impulse chairman Bertrand Piccard, the scion of a dynasty of Swiss scientists-cum-adventurers.

"Renewable energy can become an integral part of our lives, and together we can help save our planet's natural resources."

The plane's route was unveiled Tuesday in Abu Dhabi, where it will begin the journey in late February or early March.

Google began turning smartphones into real-time language translators -- of both written and spoken content.

The California-based Internet titan is hoping that, along with making it easier for people to understand one another on their travels, Google Translate will serve as a useful tool for teachers, medical personnel, police and others with important roles in increasingly multi-lingual communities.

The company on Wednesday began rolling out a new version of a free Google Translate application that, in part, lets people point Android or Apple smartphones at signs, menus, recipes or other material written in French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, or Spanish and see it in English.

"We're letting you instantly translate text using your camera, so it's way easier to navigate street signs in the Italian countryside or decide what to order off a Barcelona menu," the Google Translate team said in a blog post.

The feature builds on Word Lens technology that Google acquired last year when it bought Quest Visual, a startup founded by former video game developer Otavio Good.

Word Lens uses video mode in smartphone cameras to scan scenes, identify writing and then display it as if it were written in English, a demonstration by Good revealed.

Behind beautiful screens was a budding battle to the software brains in home entertainment centers. Samsung caused a buzz by announcing it will open its smart television platform to outside developers and rival manufacturers in a bid to be the de facto standard. But Google's rival Android TV also gain adopters.

- Wearables, wearables -

Wearable technology was seen in just about every size and shape imaginable -- in shirts, socks, shoes, bras, jewelry, headgear, for fitness and health, medical monitoring and for keeping tabs on children and pets.

The Consumer Electronics Association, which organizes the annual show, projected that US wearable unit sales will reach 30.9 million units, up 61 percent, and generate $5.1 billion in revenue in 2015 -- a 133 percent increase. Most of these are fitness bands and trackers, with smart watches and eyewear also gaining.

And yet some analysts remain skeptical about long-term prospects for wearables.

"We can't get enough of these watches and fitness trackers," said Ramon Llamas, analyst at the research firm IDC, at a forum on the sidelines of CES.

"But the fundamental question is whether wearables is a solution in search of a problem."

Industry trackers report that the abandonment rate of fitness wearables is typically measured in weeks or months.

- Music in the air -

Music was an area seeing new innovation, especially in areas to boost the quality of audio for smartphones and tablets. High-resolution audio was in focus with Sony's $1,200 luxury version of its once-hip Walkman portable music player, and others unveiled sophisticated wireless earbuds, and technology for 360-degree or 3D sound.

Mobile phones that were once stars of the annual CES gadget extravaganza took a back seat to other unveilings but one which drew attention was the powerful and sleek LG G Flex 2 with a curved screen and self-healing back cover.

The aisles of Sainsbury’s in Nine Elms Temp Store were filled with music and festive spirit on Friday 12th December 2014 as the Herbert Morrison Primary School pupils performed a selection of Christmas songs and carols.

The group was invited by colleagues to entertain customers with classics such as Rudolf the Red Nose Reindeer, Silent Night and fundraise for the schools fund.

Sainsbury’s stores across the UK were taking part in the nationwide sing along and inviting their Local Charity partners to take part and kick start the Christmas celebrations.

Cambridge University has come top of an universal association table distributed today positioning foundations on the employability of their graduates.

The college climbs from third place a year ago – thumping Oxford University, which moves down to fourth place, off the top spot. In any case, the coordinators of the alliance table – French human assets consultancy Emerging and German surveying organization Trendence – have issued a cautioning to Western colleges that Asian organizations could be going to thump them off their perch.the table demonstrates the extent of Asian colleges in the main 150 has multiplied in the previous four years from 10 every penny to 20 every penny.

Nobel prize week can prompt uncomfortable soul-searching at universities in Latin America, which has produced relatively few winners in the sciences -- a symptom, experts say, of the region's struggles in higher education.

Latin America's universities are often overcrowded, underfunded institutions where most professors do not have doctoral degrees and many students end up dropping out.

After increasing investment in higher education over the past two decades, the region has more than doubled enrollment and increased its production of scientific papers more than six-fold, to 4.3 percent of world output.

"But the bad news is that the quantity has not necessarily been accompanied by quality," said Jorge Balan, an Argentine sociologist and higher education specialist at Columbia University in New York.

"We have more scientists than in the past, more full-time university faculty, faculty which is better prepared, and their production has increased. But the quality of research is not as good in international terms."

Latin America's universities are largely absent from world rankings, and those that do make the cut come in far from the top.

In the most recent Times Higher Education rankings, no Latin American university made the top 200.

The best ranked, the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil, made the top 225 but came in behind institutions in other emerging markets like Russia, South Africa and Turkey.

And few Latin American researchers have gained international recognition at the highest levels.

Latin Americans have won the Nobel peace and literature prizes 14 times, but just seven times in the fields of physics, chemistry, medicine and economics -- a drought that has continued at this year's Nobels, which wrap up Monday with the awarding of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.

The brain drain also remains a problem for universities, with much of the best talent moving to Europe and the United States.

Across the region, fewer than one in 10 university professors has a PhD.

"In most of Latin America the academic profession is not a full-time profession. Most of these folks are part-timers who get paid very little and who have other jobs to be able to make a living," said Philip Altbach, director of the Center for International Higher Education at Boston College.

"You can't build a top-flight university on the basis of part-time faculty. That's kind of an iron law. You can't get around that."

Students also face daunting obstacles to get their degrees.

In countries like Argentina and Mexico, tertiary education is built around public universities that aim to provide free or low-cost education to anyone who can meet basic requirements.

The University of Buenos Aires and National Autonomous University of Mexico are sprawling institutions with hundreds of thousands of students, most of whom never graduate -- a system Altbach called "Darwinian."

Just 25 percent of admitted students graduate in Argentina. In Mexico, the figure is 30 percent.

High dropout rates mean resources devoted to higher education are being used inefficiently, said Liz Reisberg, an independent education consultant who has studied Latin America for 30 years.

"There's been massive investment in improving higher education, but the priority has been to focus on access -- building more institutions, creating more access for more people," she said.

As the region fights to reverse deeply entrenched inequality, what it needs, she argued, is a diversified system with more private institutions, technical training and community colleges for students who may not want or need traditional university degrees.

That, and more research funding -- particularly from the private sector.

Ocean acidification has risen by a quarter since pre-industrial times as a result of rising carbon emissions, casting a shadow over the seas as a future source of food, scientists warned on Wednesday.

In the past two centuries, the sea's acidity level has risen 26 percent, mirroring the proportion of carbon dioxide it absorbs from the air, they said in a report to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) meeting in South Korea.

Rising acidity will have damaging consequences for shellfish, corals and other calcium-making organisms which play a vital part in the food web, they said.

"It is now nearly inevitable that within 50 to 100 years, continued anthropogenic [man-made] carbon dioxide emissions will further increase ocean acidity to levels that will have widespread impacts... on marine organisms and ecosystems and the goods and services they provide," they said.

Acidification may already be affecting shellfish farms in the northwestern United States, they said.